He left earlier that morning to meet his college roommate from Berkeley for breakfast, something he did the first Saturday every month. After breakfast he planned to drop by a camera shop to buy himself a present. Then he was going to the New York Athletic Club, a private club he’d inherited a membership to a few years ago after his father died. He coveted the membership and travelled about an hour uptown to work out there every weekend no matter what.
Caitlin asked him before he left why he would buy a new camera and then go workout. He didn’t answer the question, instead he cocked his head a tiny bit, imperceptible to someone who wasn’t used to his ways.
‘It seems like buying the camera would come after the workout. On the way home.’ No response. ‘Where is this camera going to be while you play squash, Tony?’ He was putting his Nike’s into a duffle bag, quickly nodding as she questioned him.
‘Honey bun, after the club I’m going to be gnarly. I want to get home and hop in the shower. Besides, the shop is on the way there, and the front desk girls at the club will keep the camera safe for me. If I even buy anything.’ He was going to buy something. When he had an idea of something he wanted to buy, he bought it.
He blew her a kiss that turned into a wave goodbye as he shut the door behind him. Caitlin stayed on the couch for a couple hours watching a marathon of The Hills while scrolling through the blog Man Repeller and the latest Goop newsletter. She had no specific plans that morning until a clerk from the Marc Jacobs store on Bleeker called her to say her purse was ready to be picked up later that day. Caitlin charged a deposit on the backordered purse that past summer, and she’d been giddy with anticipation while waiting for the purse to arrive.
Around noon she toasted a piece of the french baguette that Tony got delivered every weekend from Amy’s Bread, spreading a thin layer of butter and apricot jam across the surface. Hunched cross legged on the couch, she ate her snack over a paper towel, watching the scene where Lauren Conrad meets Justin Bobby for the first time. Golden breadcrumbs glinted on the black leather upholstery. Tony would notice them as soon as he got home. She decided to spiff up the place and hoped Tony would be pleased.
She vacuumed the carpet in the living room, cleaned out the refrigerator, unloaded the dishwasher, mopped the kitchen floor, and took the garbage to the trash shoot. As she was gathering some of her dirty clothes to do a load of laundry, she checked Tony’s hamper. She gathered a few t-shirts, some boxer briefs, wifebeaters, and a pair of basketball shorts out of the hamper. The clothes were about to be tossed into their laundry bag when she noticed one of the pant legs felt hard. Caitlin kneaded the mesh material in between her fingers looking for whatever was causing the stiffness. She turned the shorts inside out and found dried semen. It was everywhere. Caitlin held the garment in her hands, examining the white film, flicking it with her fingernail, wondering how it had come to this exact location. For a second, she wondered if a hot glue gun had detonated near Tony’s crotch but that made no sense. It didn’t look like dried glue. It looked like cum.
She shoved the other clothes back in the hamper and brought the crusty shorts into the bathroom to examine the stain in better light. The shorts were the only evidence Caitlin had that something was going on. The semen defied logic. Tony’s shorts were a crime scene, his cum was evidence.
Two years earlier Caitlin met Tony at Il Mulino’s in Tribeca, a few days after Thanksgiving. She was seated at the bar alone, drinking free wine the bartender kept serving her. Tony sat next to her, offered to buy her next glass of red, and she told him he didn’t need to because her drinks were on the house. ‘Get me one, then.’
At first, she didn’t find Tony sexy. He was at least twice her age—she was twenty-four and had never dated anyone older than her. Tony was very tall, but his mop of wavy strawberry blonde hair made him look more mischievous than dashing. And he was too nice, which automatically made Caitlin act bitchy in a nonchalant way. But Tony was unfazed by her attitude and they ended up chatting for an hour. When he asked her out for dinner the next night she thought why not? Being pursued was exciting. And he pulled a super classy move when it was time for her to catch the train home by escorting her outside and putting her in a cab and paying the fare for her.
The next night Tony took her to Blue Hill. According to Yelp it was one of the best restaurants in the city. There she learned Tony had a two-bedroom condo in the West Village on Grove Street, across from the apartment they showed exterior shots of on the show Friends. Tony was perhaps the last decent single guy in New York City. When the waiter asked them if they wanted dessert as their dinner plates were being cleared, Tony turned to her and said, ‘I have a pint of gelato in my freezer back home. Come have some with me.’ She asked him what kind of gelato and pretended to be undecided when he said pistachio, like the flavor was a factor on whether not she was going to go home with him. But she couldn’t wait to see his house and held his hand as they left the restaurant. Tony hailed a cab to the West Village.
When she walked into his place and saw how chic it was, she started to perspire a tiny bit. The aesthetic was mid-century modern, a style Caitlin read about in Nylon but had never seen in person. Tony had two sets of Eames chairs facing one another, and she wondered if they were vintage. All his sleek furniture was either black or white expensive smelling leather, a hefty scent that turned her on. When Tony dimmed the lights and suggested he give her a tour, like it was this spur of the moment idea he had, she decided to stay for the night and let Tony seduce her.
Earlier at dinner, Caitlin was asking herself if she’d end up fucking Tony and she’d decided against it. Even though he was sophisticated and had a great job and was attentive and flirtatious, she wasn’t attracted to him. But after seeing the condo, she figured she’d been wrong, judgmental even, about Tony. He was very hot once they were in his bedroom, and Caitlin felt an ache in between her legs as soon as they started kissing. She unbuckled his belt and he barely got her out of her knockoff Herve Leger bandage dress before they started doing it.
The sex didn’t last too long, but after Tony finished, Caitlin pulled up her underwear and sighed, ‘That was incredible.’
Tony told her they weren’t done yet, helped her remove her underwear again, and went down on her. She had an orgasm within a few minutes, the first of many that night. She fell asleep next to him as the sun was rising and was sad to leave an hour later. She had to catch a bus back to Weehawken and get freshened up to be back into the city by noon to work her shift at the Diane Von Furstenberg flagship store she managed.
Tony courted Caitlin for months. He sent flowers to her job whenever he was out of town on business trips. They ate at the fanciest restaurants in the city, Per Se and Eleven Madison Park and Le Bernardin. Tony was an intellectual property lawyer and he brought her to business dinners that he charged on his firm’s expense account. He took her to parties that his friends threw and said, ‘This is my beautiful girlfriend,’ whenever he introduced her to anyone. He booked a New Year’s getaway to Martinique, an island she’d never heard of, after knowing her for only a few weeks. He told her that he wanted to end the year and begin 2010 with her as a celebration of their new life together. Caitlin was swept up in the intoxication of their relationship and never wanted to be apart from Tony. She technically lived in New Jersey, but she stayed with Tony for days at a time, and every single weekend, since her job was only a fifteen minute walk from his condo.
Caitlin had never been in a serious relationship before she met Tony. She considered her two ex-boyfriends from Rutgers the real thing— they were mostly monogamous relationships that lasted about a year. But being Tony’s girlfriend showed Caitlin how it felt to truly be desired. Every evening after work when she walked into his condo, he got up from the couch to meet her, and they kissed deeply for several minutes, as though they hadn’t seen each other in days. Tony cupped her face in his hands, and would inhale her perfume sharply into his nostrils, and hug her tight against him. Sometimes they’d have sex as soon as she got to his house, and he would make her cum so many times that she would grip the bedsheets up against her mouth to quiet herself while she cried out. Afterwards they’d take a shower together and put on pajamas and order pizza, or they’d stay in bed talking, telling each other stories about when they were little kids.
Tony gave Caitlin dozens of pet names. He hung on her every word whenever she told him about her day. Sometimes she’d get self-conscious mid-sentence talking at length about her lunch order from Pret, or helping Parker Posey into a dressing room at work and she’d apologize and say, ‘You don’t want to hear about this stuff,’ but Tony would respond, ‘I could listen to you for hours. I’d listen to you read the phone book.’ Caitlin would gaze at him returning the gesture when he shared with her what his day had been like. He’d always finish by saying something about how the day dragged on relentlessly and the only thing he looked forward to all day was seeing her face when she walked through the door to his house. Caitlin used to furrow her brow and ignore anything she considered overly saccharine, but Tony made her feel beautiful, special, and sexy. She started to twist in various emotional directions to extract attention from Tony. She would sit alone and pout if he was busy working, or, put her fingers in her mouth and eye fuck him while they lounged on the couch when it seemed like he wasn’t in the mood to fool around. Tony responded to every mood Caitlin displayed, whether she was being bratty or adorable, the same way— he’d kiss her, and pet her hair, and tell her how incredible he thought she was.
◆
She fell in love with him the first week they started dating, but knew she had to wait until he said it first before she could say it back. Caitlin kept waiting, anticipating he would say it over Christmas, or in Martinique for New Year’s, or eventually by her birthday their first summer together. But Tony didn’t say it until after their first anniversary passed. They’d gone to a skiing village in Switzerland to celebrate, where they stayed in a posh hotel that had floor to ceiling windows overlooking the mountains and in-room couples’ massages. Caitlin packed several pieces of Cosabella lingerie that Tony had never seen before. Every day they skied and shopped, and every night she acted out perverted sexual fantasies with him while wearing lacy bras and crotchless panties, or garter belts and leather wrist cuffs that locked with a tiny key. Before they left for Switzerland, the kinkiest their sex life had gotten was when they had drunk sex for a few minutes in the bathroom at Buddakan, but Caitlin wanted to make their trip unforgettable. The vacation, and the role playing, revived a sexual spark that had been smoldering recently. Caitlin had worried Tony was no longer attracted to her, but she also worried that asking Tony about why that was might be categorically unsexy also. Instead of talking about what was bothering her, Caitlin took all her fears and placed them in an imaginary box that she tucked away in the corners of her mind. She acted fine in front of Tony all day, and performed nightly for him in their hotel room. She pretended to be an expensive call girl, a french maid who gave him a blow job as he stood naked up against one of the large window panes in their room, and a dominatrix who let Tony slap her ass and lightly clutch her neck which caused them both to have simultaneous orgasms.
Caitlin was satisfied on their trip that Tony wanted her just as much as he did when he first met her, and she was certain that before they got home, he’d say I love you. But he didn’t. A few weeks later she stole an idea from Sex & The City and had ‘I LOVE YOU’ written in red icing across a giant heart shaped chocolate chip cookie. She gave it to him after dinner one night, and when he read the message on the cookie aloud, Caitlin responded, ‘I love you, too!’ Tony fed her a chunk of the cookie and grabbed dessert plates and glasses from the cupboard, then opened the fridge for milk.
Still chewing, she asked, ‘Do you?’ while she reached for the milk he poured her.
‘Of course I do. I should say it more.’
You don’t say it all she thought, but instead of starting a conversation that she didn’t want to have, she watched Tony eat every morsel of the giant cookie instead.
Over the next few months Caitlin said ‘I love you’ every time they kissed each other goodbye or got off the phone. She said it after sex when he pulled out and came on her stomach or back. He always responded, ‘I love you too’, leaving Caitlin bereft. She hoped the words would bring the feelings associated with them, but ‘I love you too’ sounded no different than when he said ‘sausage’ if she asked what he wanted on his pizza before she called to order take-out.
On the surface everything felt the way it was supposed to feel. They spent every weekend together. She was friends with all of Tony’s friends and family on Facebook, something Caitlin considered a valid sign they were in a serious relationship. Tony was planning a birthday trip for her to Reykjavik in a few months. They’d already gotten plane tickets. Tony paid for them. He paid for almost everything. Caitlin didn’t expect him to finance their relationship, and she told him when they first started going out that she felt insecure that she could barely afford to grab the checks at dinner or buy Tony expensive presents.
‘But I don’t expect that from you. We don’t expect that from each other. I’m just being pragmatic. I don’t want you trying to pay for things you can’t afford. If you get a raise or a new job and things change, you can buy me dinner. But for now, this is nothing to be insecure about.’
Caitlin didn’t bother to protest. If Tony didn’t resent always being the one to pay, Caitlin enjoyed being taken care of.
Before they left for Iceland, Tony paid off the balance on Caitlin’s student loans. He watched her one evening while she sat at the kitchen table, writing checks to Sallie Mae.
‘Do you mind telling me how much money you spend a month on your student loans?’
‘Not much, about a hundred bucks.’
Tony told her she’d be paying her loans until the day she died, and he offered to give her the money to pay them off. Caitlin refused, thanking him for his generosity. ‘I can’t! It’s more money than I make in a year.’
But Tony insisted. The next day he told her he was transferring the balance of the loans into her bank account, and Caitlin wrote down her account and routing numbers on the notepad Tony pushed toward her on the kitchen counter.
‘The money isn’t a big deal to me. It’d make me feel good in the future knowing I was able to do this for you.’
Caitlin only heard the word ‘future.’ She couldn’t imagine Tony giving her that much money if he didn’t see himself with her long term. She didn’t realize Tony was someone who wouldn’t blink at giving a girlfriend fifty thousand dollars but would only say I love you if he was tricked into it.
The high of being debt free wore off quickly, and Caitlin worried why they never talked about the relationship evolving to the next level. She’d never dated someone this long where everything seemed so perfect. After nearly a year and a half together she wanted Tony to be her husband, but she didn’t know how she would feel satisfied as his wife if she didn’t feel like he truly loved her. And never mind a marriage proposal. Tony hadn’t ever mentioned her moving in. Caitlin left clothes there, her shampoo was in his shower, her toothbrush was next to his, but this was more of a convenience since she went to work so frequently from his house. Tony never protested at having her things at his house, but he never invited her to keep them there. Unless he was planning their next getaway, he never planned anything beyond a week with her.
She brought it up the night they were leaving for Reykjavik. Tony was on the phone with his assistant, a recent graduate from UC Santa Barbara named Rachel. She’d never met her, but she found Rachel’s Facebook profile as soon as she overheard Tony say Rachel’s last name. Rachel Crawford had dozens of photos of herself on the beach, her augmented tits barely covered by the little triangles of her bikini top. Tony was supposed to be filling her in on some last minute client issues before they left for the airport. He left his unpacked suitcase on the bed and went into the bathroom to gather his toiletries and Caitlin overheard him talking to Rachel about his younger brother Richard who was possibly returning to rehab. He stayed in the bathroom on the phone for nearly twenty minutes, talking to her about his brother, his mother, and Richard’s children. There were long pauses while he listened to her speak, the occasional ‘Yeah … you’re right. I know … right,’ coming from his mouth. When he finally hung up and came into the bedroom again, Caitlin told him what she wanted for her birthday.
‘You basically already live here. Don’t give up your lease. That’s a huge step. Your apartment is rent controlled. You’ll never find that again with a view of the river.’
‘I don’t want to find rent controlled again. I want to be with you. If I sign my lease, that means I wouldn’t move in here for another year. Is that what you want?’
‘I hadn’t thought about it really. You’re here almost every night. You have your own key. Your Architectural Digest and Paper magazines get delivered here. You stay here when I’m out of town. Baby love, I’m not kidding. You will never, ever find a rent controlled apartment again. The fact that you even have one now astounds me to this day.’
‘If it’s like I already live here, then why can’t I live here?’
Tony spoke to her in his lawyer voice. ‘This relationship is great. Why do we need to change anything?’ Tony’s persuasion usually won her over, and anytime she acquiesced to him it felt like they were compromising, but Caitlin sulked in silence the entire ride to JFK and only spoke to him once while they waited to board their flight, asking ‘You never think about it?’ But Tony ignored her, his gaze focused on a New York Magazine cover that had a headline stating I Love My Children, I Hate My Life.
The conversation lasted the duration of their trip, which wasn’t what Tony wanted. He kept affirming that moving in together wasn’t a guarantee they’d always be together, and that giving up her lease was a mistake. She fought back with a defeated tone implying if they weren’t discussing a future together, then it sounded like they were headed towards breaking up.
‘I wish you never paid off my student loan. I hate knowing you can give me fifty grand without me asking for it but living together is something you can’t even consider. If we can’t discuss moving this relationship forward, then it sounds like we’re talking about moving on without each other.’
Every time she hinted about a split, Tony became visibly uneasy, closing his eyes and rapidly shaking his head. He relented on the drive to the hot springs in Geysir, telling her that he was nervous, since he had never lived with anyone before.
‘Well neither have I. It’ll be fun.’
‘Babe, you’re twenty six. But I’m more of a kid than you are.’
It wasn’t often Tony made a disparaging comment that somehow complimented her, but she remained silent. She’d exhausted herself from pleading all week and didn’t feel satisfied at all.
Caitlin thought moving into Tony’s place would be awesome. Once she got there, it felt like she was trying to keep a job at a company where she knew she was underqualified. Tony was a total baby when it came to making room for her in his closet. He refused to let her keep anything in there except shoes, insisting they’d go furniture shopping and he’d buy a large armoire for her clothes. She told him she’d still need a place to hang her dresses and jackets in addition to a piece of furniture. How this made no sense to a man who was a partner at one of the biggest law firms in the country was infuriating.
Tony showed her a photo album he kept inside a suitcase in his closet. ‘You’ll see this eventually,’ he sighed as he handed it to her. The first page was blank except for an index card that read ‘Jennifer’ in red magic marker. The next few pages were all pictures of Tony and his college girlfriend. He’d always referred to her as his college sweetheart. Jennifer went to Berkeley too, and had pictures of her on Haight Ashbury in a Talking Heads t-shirt, and photos of her in a bikini on the beach. The next page had another index card that read ‘Michelle.’ Michelle was the girl Tony dated after college, the one his mother called The Mormon. Caitlin shut the photo album and looked at Tony, dumbfounded.
‘You keep an ex-girlfriend scrapbook hidden in your suitcase?’
‘Listen honey bunches of oats, it’s not a hidden scrapbook. It’s a photo album, and I’m showing it to you now, so you don’t freak out if you find it.’
‘This looks curated to only highlight all your exes though,’ she said, handing it back to him.
‘Well, it’s not.’ He handed her a bunch of empty hangers and left the closet. From then on, the album sat on a shelf in the living room.
Tony started enforcing rules that had never been mentioned before. No eating anywhere except the kitchen, wipe the bathroom sink down after teeth brushing and face washing, make the bed every morning once she got up. She asked Tony, ‘Since when?’ anytime he’d tell her one of his dumb rules, and he would answer, ‘Since you stopped being a guest.’
Pretty soon, the sex became predictable. She’d wake up almost every morning with Tony’s boner pressing up against her ass, and they’d do it doggystyle without any kissing because he hated morning breath. Then he would shower and head to work before 7 a.m. leaving her in bed until she needed to get ready for work, too. Anytime they had sex on the weekends she’d initiate a role playing scenario to turn up the heat. Tony got off the hardest when she’d have him pretend she was someone else while he was fucking her. She’d tell him to imagine she was the petite brunette hostess who always flirted with him anytime they went to the Waverly Inn, or the new girlfriend with the big tits his coworker had brought to a recent client dinner. She’d rotate in some of Tony’s ex-girlfriends and started mentioning his assistant Rachel when they were having sex. While Tony was pounding into her she’d say something like, ‘Is Rachel’s pussy all over that dirty dick?’ and he would groan out a climax within seconds. Once she sat next to Tony on the couch in a tight belly t-shirt and nothing else and told him to go down on her like he wanted to go down on Rachel.
He stared at her for a minute.
‘I can’t do this if you’re going to get jealous of her when we’re not playing this game.’ Caitlin pulled her shirt up and started massaging her tits. The sex they had that afternoon was rough, leaving her sore around her pelvis. She stopped expecting that the sexual chemistry would strengthen the relationship, because it never did. Instead, the fantasies allowed her to pretend that Tony was still attracted to her the way he was when they first met. But afterwards Caitlin felt like a puppy, batting a paw at her owner begging for more tummy rubs once the attention stopped.
The last few weeks had been more fun at home as Tony and Caitlin planned their winter trip for their second anniversary. They were going hiking in Argentina, and Tony wanted a new camera so he could photograph the waterfalls along the Iguazu River. Having something to look forward to always bonded them, whether it was making a special trip to get the famous cotton candy at the restaurant in the Four Seasons Hotel or a trip abroad where they planned every meal, shopping excursion, and opportunity to sight see. If she sensed Tony was in a sour mood or that she was annoying him, she would say ‘God, I can’t wait to go to South America,’ and he would perk up and they’d start to gush about the vacation. There were only so many times they could fantasize about their vacation. Most of the time Caitlin sat in dread, worried that Tony was over her.
And then she found the shorts.
◆
Caitlin sat on a blue vinyl bench staring at the rows of shoes on display as she waited for a salesman to retrieve her purse at the Marc Jacobs store. She noticed a pair of red pointy upturned-toe platform sandals that Chloe Sevigny had been photographed in. Caitlin wanted to try them on, so she took one off the display table and looked at the price tag on the sole of sandal. It read $450.
‘Do you want me to grab your size?’ a saleswoman walking by asked Caitlin.
‘No, I don’t want to get my hopes up, these are out of my price range.’
The saleswoman ignored her response and kept walking. Caitlin started to sit back down when the man who was finding her purse emerged from the back room, holding a dark gray merchandise box in his hands. Caitlin walked over to the counter, trying to calculate what her monthly credit card payments would be on her next Mastercard statement now that she’d finally be charged for the bag.
‘The Stam bag,’ the salesman announced, opening the box so Caitlin could inspect the slouchy quilted navy blue leather purse.
He seemed like he was waiting for a response from Caitlin, so she stroked the purse and said, ‘She’s gorgeous,’ as she handed him her credit card. He closed the box and put it in a large shopping bag, and Caitlin left the store with her new purse and searched for some excitement to feel over possessing a bag she’d wanted for almost five years. But she felt nothing. Just like when Tony wanted sausage on his pizza.
◆
She could smell Tony’s Vetiver and Grapefruit body wash from Molton Brown when she walked down the hall to the condo. She opened the door to the apartment to find him sprawled on the couch, wearing dark jeans she’d gotten him from Diesel and a black Henley shirt. He looked great.
‘Where’d you run off to?’ he asked as he muted the tv and got up to greet her.
Caitlin couldn’t get any words out. She didn’t want to start a fight over the stain in the shorts, but she couldn’t shrink into a version of herself where she pretended everything was okay. She showed him the Marc Jacobs bag up as an explanation.
‘But I was texting you.’
Caitlin held her iPod up as an excuse. ‘I was listening to music.’
‘But you always check your phone.’
‘Not always.’
‘Can I show you my camera?’ he gently took her hand and pulled her into the kitchen. Caitlin let him lead. She absorbed his full attention, like sunshine after weeks of rain. Before he showed her what he bought he wrapped a tight hug around her body and cupped the back of her head in his hand. He took a deep inhale of her mint scented shampoo.
‘Thank you for cleaning up. It looks so good in here,’ he mumbled, his face still buried in her hair.
Tony took his time showing her every feature the new camera boasted and explained how the viewfinder would catch all the crystal blue detail in the waterfalls on their upcoming trip.
‘It takes portraits too. I made sure to get a full range camera, so I can get landscapes, action shots, and lots of pretty pictures of you.’
‘I want you to take some now. I’ll be right back, I want to change.’
Caitlin stood on the tip of her toes and gave Tony a soft kiss. He kissed her back, harder, and then smacked her ass and gently shoved her toward their bedroom. Caitlin opened her underwear drawer, sorted through her lingerie, and selected a lacy dark red bra with a matching thong. Her suspicions hadn’t gone away, but she wanted to be the woman Tony desired a little while longer before she eventually became something else to him. She changed into the lingerie, walked into the living room and positioned herself on the couch with her back arched and her legs crossed, waiting for Tony to adjust his camera and start taking her picture. She wondered again why his cum was spatter stained inside his shorts, she wondered why he hadn’t been wearing underwear underneath them. She wondered who else would see these pictures of her in Tony’s photo album someday. Tony’s camera started clicking as he snapped a few photos of her. Caitlin stuffed her fears away into that imaginary box that she tucked far away in the privacy of her mind, posed for the camera lens, and smiled.